AI Engineer – Agentic Orchestration

Description

Job Title:  AI Engineer – Agentic Orchestration (Senior)

Place of Performance:  DC-Metro Area Preferred

Mandatory Requirements: Secret clearance

Experience Level: 6-8+ years

On-Site, hybrid, remote: Remote (Occasional customer on-site meetings)

Travel:  Minimal / As Required

About JFL Consulting: With more than 20 years of securing some of the U.S. Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community’s most critical networks, JFL Consulting, LLC provides advanced network security solutions to a range of US Government and US commercial clients. Our cybersecurity operators are experts at assessing and defending mission-critical data and the networks that facilitate their operation. We are focused on delivering advanced products and industry best practices that meet each customer’s unique requirements. Visit www.jflconsulting.com  

What We Offer:

• Salary: $160k - $190k

• 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision premiums for employees and dependents

• Flexible Spending Accounts (healthcare, dependent care, and commuter)

• Life insurance, short-term disability and long-term disability

• 401(k) with immediate vesting of company contribution

• Generous PTO policy (15 vacation, 5 sick, 2 personal days, 11 holidays)

• We support your growth through certification reimbursement, dedicated professional development funding, and company-provided access to online learning platforms

Position Overview

The AI Engineer – Agentic Orchestration is a senior back-end engineer supporting a pilot program that is re-platforming a capabilities onto an enterprise AI platform to deliver predictive, decision-grade decision making capabilities to the customer. The primary responsibility for this role is architecting, building, and maintaining the production API integrations and data-pipeline components that flow data from disparate sources into the program’s Common Operating Picture (COP), and orchestrating the agentic AI workflows that operate on that data. The engineer implements and versions robust interface contracts, builds high-throughput pipeline components that keep the COP reliable and current, writes rigorous integration and contract tests, tunes performance and reliability under heavy operational load, and authors clear technical documentation for long-term maintainability. 

Key Responsibilities

API Integration & Data Pipelines

• Architect, build, and maintain production API integrations that ingest data from disparate operational, medical, and intelligence sources into the Common Operating Picture (COP).

• Design, implement, and version robust interface contracts (REST/GraphQL, OpenAPI specifications) that external and internal producers can reliably build against.

• Build and operate high-throughput, event-driven data-pipeline components (e.g., Apache Kafka) that keep the COP current, complete, and resilient to upstream failures.

• Integrate data products, ontologies, and pipelines within the platform environment (e.g., Palantir Foundry) and cloud-hosted services in AWS GovCloud.

• Implement enterprise authentication and authorization patterns (e.g., OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, SAML, PKI/CAC, attribute- and role-based access control) across integrated services.

Agentic Orchestration & AI Workflows

• Design and implement agentic AI workflows that chain models, tools, and data services to move data from after-the-fact reporting toward predictive, decision-grade warning.

• Build and maintain the orchestration layer (tool/function calling, prompt and workflow versioning, guardrails, retrieval, and evaluation harnesses) that exposes COP data to agents safely and repeatably.

• Instrument agent behavior with logging, tracing, and evaluation metrics so outputs are explainable, testable, and auditable by program stakeholders.

• Develop using open standards and avoid proprietary lock-in, consistent with Government data-rights requirements covering custom code, schemas, ontologies, prompts, and agentic workflows.

Quality, Testing & Documentation

• Write rigorous integration and contract tests; maintain automated CI/CD pipelines that validate interface compatibility on every change.

• Author and maintain clear technical documentation (interface specifications, data-flow diagrams, runbooks, and architecture decision records) for long-term maintainability and Government transition.

• Participate in design and code reviews; enforce coding standards and secure development practices.

Performance, Reliability & Security

• Tune system performance, throughput, and reliability under heavy operational load; identify and remove bottlenecks in ingestion, transformation, and serving paths.

• Build in observability (metrics, logs, alerts) and contribute to incident triage and root-cause analysis for integration and pipeline failures.

• Engineer to the program’s security posture, including NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 Moderate-High / IL5–IL6 requirements and CUI safeguarding under NIST SP 800-171 / DFARS 252.204-7012.

Collaboration & Delivery

• Work as an embedded member of the prime contractor’s integration team; coordinate closely with front-end, platform, data, and Government stakeholders.

• Deliver against fixed program milestones (Minimum Viable Product and Final Operational Capability) and report progress, risks, and technical dependencies to program leadership.

• Translate operational user needs from Combatant Command and medical stakeholders into integration and workflow requirements.

Requirements

Qualifications & Requirements

Mandatory Requirements

• Citizenship: U.S. Citizenship required.

• Clearance: Active Secret clearance.

Education

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related engineering field; or equivalent relevant experience.

Experience:

• 8+ years of professional back-end or API integration engineering experience.

• Demonstrated experience designing, versioning, and operating production APIs and data pipelines that other teams depend on.

• Experience building or integrating LLM-based or agentic AI workflows (tool calling, orchestration frameworks, retrieval, evaluation) in a production or prototype setting.

• Experience delivering software on Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, or other federal programs in cloud-hosted, security-controlled environments is strongly preferred.

Technical Skills & Competencies

• Expert-level Python.

• Deep experience with REST and GraphQL API design and OpenAPI specifications, including interface versioning and backward-compatibility strategies.

• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka or comparable streaming/event platforms.

• Experience with Palantir Foundry (pipelines, ontology, data integration) is highly desired.

• Experience deploying and operating services in AWS GovCloud (or comparable IL5/IL6 cloud environments).

• Strong understanding of enterprise authentication and authorization patterns (OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, SAML, PKI/CAC, RBAC/ABAC).

• Familiarity with agentic AI tooling and patterns (e.g., LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or custom orchestration; function/tool calling; RAG; prompt and workflow versioning; model evaluation).

• Proficiency with integration and contract testing, CI/CD, containers, and infrastructure-as-code.

• Working knowledge of secure software development practices and NIST SP 800-53 / 800-171 controls as they apply to application and data-pipeline design.

Communication & Stakeholder Engagement

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to author precise technical specifications and documentation.

• Ability to explain integration architectures, data flows, and agent behavior clearly to engineers, program managers, and Government stakeholders.

• Self-directed and comfortable operating as a single senior engineer embedded in a partner team, managing competing priorities against fixed milestone dates.